Wednesday, May 30, 2007

How important is Surface?

Gattis took out a digital camera and placed it on the Surface. Instantly, digital pictures spilled out onto the tabletop. As Gattis touched and dragged each picture, it followed his fingers around the screen. Using two fingers, he pulled the corners of a photo and stretched it to a new size. Then, Gattis put a cellphone on the surface and dragged several photos to it — just like that, the pictures uploaded to the phone. It was like a magic trick. He was dragging and dropping virtual content to physical objects.

This is very important for sure, but most likely in a kind of Apple Lisa way. We've known this is the future of computing for some time, and it's great to see it demonstrated in something we can actually buy (Jeff Han's Multi-Touch system is too expensive for anything but research projects>. We know though where the first multi-touch screen that most regular folks get to use will be. Perhaps Apple are destined to be the Microsoft of the Integrated Software-Hardware Era, simplifying and popularising innovations that others can rightly claim to have brought to market first.
UPDATE: Here's the official Microsoft Surface site.